Commonly called by the anglicised form of his Christian name, Titian, was
born at Cadore, near Venice, in 1477. His studies in art began at the age
of ten, under a painter named Zuccato, from whose studio he passed to
Gentile Bellini’s, and from his again to that of his brother Giovanni.
Space forbids us to do more than indicate the chief landmarks in Titian’s
long, eventful, and illustrious life. When his reputation as a great
artist was new, before he was thirty years old, he visited the court of
Ferrara, and executed for the duke two of his earliest masterpieces, the
“Tribute Money,” now at Dresden, and the “Bacchus and Ariadne,” in the
National Gallery of London. In 1516 he painted his great altarpiece, the
“Assumption,” now removed from its church to the Accademia at Venice,
and was at once placed by this incomparable work in the highest rank of
painters. The “Entombment” of the Louvre was painted about 1523; and in
1528 he executed another magnificent altarpiece, the “Death of St. Peter
Martyr,” in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which was destroyed in
the fire of 1867. In 1530 Titian was invited to Bologna, to paint the
portrait of the Emperor Charles V.; and he is supposed by some writers
to have accompanied the emperor shortly afterward to Spain. Owing to the
patronage which Charles V. and his son Philip II. liberally conferred on
the artist, Madrid possesses a collection of his works second in number
and importance only to the treasures of Venice. The “Presentation in
the Temple,” in the Accademia at Venice, dates from about 1539, and the
“Christ at Emmaus,” in the Louvre, from about 1546. In 1545 he painted at
Rome the celebrated portrait of “Pope Paul III.,” in the Naples Museum.
Titian continued active in his art even up to the time of his death,
which occurred in 1576, at the great age of ninety-nine. His style, as
is to be expected, changed considerably in the course of his long life,
and the pictures painted in his last years, though full of color, are
infirm in drawing and execution; in the full vigor of his powers he was
a draughtsman second to none, though never aiming at the select beauty
of form attained by the Florentine school, and by Raphael. It was this
that led Michelangelo to say that, with a better mode of study, “This man
might have been as eminent in design as he is true to nature and masterly
in counterfeiting the life, and then, nothing could be desired better
or more perfect;” adding, “for he has an exquisite perception, and a
delightful spirit and manner.”
The splendid artistic power of Titian may perhaps be better discerned
in his portraits than in the more ambitious works of sacred art. He
stands unquestionably at the head of portrait painters of all ages and
of all schools; not even Velasquez equaling him at his best. Beside
religious pictures and portraits he painted a great number of subjects
from classical mythology. Among the most famous, beside the “Bacchus
and Ariadne,” mentioned above—the pride of the English collection—may
be named the “Bacchanals” of Madrid, the two of “Venus” in the Uffizi,
at Florence, the “Danae,” at Naples, and the often repeated “Venus and
Adonis,” and “Diana and Callisto.” He is seen at his very best in the
“Venus” of the Tribune, at Florence, perhaps the only work of his which
has escaped retouching, and in the exquisite allegory called “Sacred and
Profane Love,” at the Borghese Palace, at Rome. As a landscape painter,
he possessed a sentiment for nature in all its forms which had never
before been seen, and his backgrounds have never been equaled since.
The mountains in the neighborhood of his native town, Cadore, of which,
as well as of other landscape scenes, numerous pen and ink drawings by
his hand are in existence, inspired him, doubtless, with that solemn
treatment of effects of cloud and light and shade and blue distance for
which his pictures are conspicuous.
It is unnecessary to deal with the school of painting which exists in
Italy at the present day. It would be paying it too high a compliment
to regard it as the legitimate successor of the art of those great
epochs whose course we have tried to sketch. The modern Italian school
is little more than an echo of the modern French. And seeing that
there is no principle clearer or more certain than this, that a great
national school of art can flourish only when it springs from a sane and
vigorous national existence, it is not to be wondered at if a country
so convulsed by the political passions and so vulgarized by the social
triviality and meanness of modern times, should be in this respect cast
down further than her more fortunate neighbors by the same causes which
have soiled even the best art of the nineteenth century with something of
dilettantism and affectation.